Clause 1
Child Poverty Bill
11:00 am
Stephen Timms (Financial Secretary, HM Treasury; East Ham, Labour)
People listening to and reading the debate will be much more likely to agree with my hon. Friends the Members for Amber Valley and for Regent’s Park and Kensington, North: poverty is an overriding concern. As others have said, it is right for the Bill to focus tightly on that concern, rather than on lots of things. The amendment suggests that instead, the Bill should cover a wider range of policy areas and set targets through regulations on a wide range of outcomes relating to child poverty. It is true that they relate to child poverty; they are not irrelevant or unrelated and it is important to tackle them. Indeed, there are Government proposals and measures in place to tackle them, and there are targets, but we should not have targets in the Bill. That would water down the bright spotlight on poverty, which is the Bill’s great strength.